How does india treat women

In Indian society, women are traditionally discriminated against and excluded from political and family related decisions. Despite the large amount of work women must do on a daily basis to support their families, their opinions are rarely acknowledged and their rights are limited.

From the time they are born, young Indian girls are the victims of discrimination. With more than 24, reported cases in , rape registered a 9. More than half Neighbours accounted for a third of the offenders, while parents and other relatives were also involved.

And it is not rape alone. Police records from show kidnappings and abductions of women were up The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has estimated that more than m women are "missing" worldwide - women who would have been around had they received similar healthcare, medicine and nutrition as men. New research by economists Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray estimates that in India, more than 2m women are missing in a given year.

They found that women died more from "injuries" in a given year than while giving birth - injuries, they say, "appear to be indicator of violence against women". Northern women's autonomy is constrained through arranged marriage, and the watchful eyes of joint families which are more common in the North. Though youn g, professional women may wish to venture out, Northern cities are dangerous places. In Delhi and Haryana, young women experience relentless sexual harassment - especially in overcrowded public transport and from unemployed male youth.

Women fear for both their physical safety and their reputations - as observers see them going out and draw inferences about their impurity. Delhi along with Bihar and Uttar Pradesh consistently ranks as the most unsafe place for women.

Fear of rape curbs female labour force participation across India. Female labour force participation is lowest on the Indo-Gangetic plain, where Muslim rule was concentrated. It is also much more gender segregated.

Most Delhi women working in manufacturing do so within their own home - with scant opportunities to expand their networks, organise, gain skills or autonomy. In Lucknow, working women are concentrated in subcontracted work and as unpaid labour in family enterprises. They work, but rarely interact with outsiders. They remain dependent on male intermediaries. If women remain secluded , they are less likely to collectively critique and challenge their subordination. So women workers in Haryana do not always question gender wage gaps , for they presume men to be more competent.

As a 19th century Haryana saying goes, " jeore se nara ghisna hai " women as cattle bound, working and enduring all. In the Indo-Gangetic plain, most women eat after men have been served. This bias exacerbates sex ratios, via female malnutrition. In sum, gender segregation became more widespread under Islamic rule. Men continue to dominate public life, while women are more rooted in their families, seldom gathering to resist structural inequalities.

But I must qualify the impact of the Islamic invasions. First, even before the raids, purdah was observed by a few royal houses in the North. Second, other patriarchal practices like pre-pubescent marriage, proscriptions on widow remarriage, and sati long predated the invasions. The Mughals actually criticised sati , some even banned it.

Akbar insisted on female consent, though others remained quiet as they feared revolt. Third, despite a shared culture of purdah, women's labour force participation varies across the North. These differences may be rooted in traditional agriculture. Before the modern era, almost everyone produced their own food, and the system for producing food was the most fundamental way in which gender ideologies became entrenched. Where men were integral to production in wheat fields and plow-cultivation , women stayed at home.

Over the centuries, gender divisions of labour became normalised. In the forested hills of North-East India women have always been integral to shifting cultivation. Women's long-standing predominance in the public sphere has enhanced their physical and economic autonomy.

Daughters are valued as providers, so sex ratios remain even. Elsewhere in India, cultivation is less labour intensive, so women are not always needed in the fields.

Wheat has been grown for centuries on the fertile, alluvial Indo-Gangetic plain. Cultivation is not terribly labour-intensive, though cereals must still be processed, shelled and ground. This lowers demand for female labour in the field, and heightens its importance at home. Rice-cultivation is much more labour intensive. It requires the construction of tanks and irrigation channels, planting, transplanting, and harvesting.

Women are needed in the fields. Rice is the staple crop in the South. Over the centuries, women's work became normalised in rice-growing regions, and thus persists outside agriculture. Soil texture varies across India. Southern districts have stickier, clayey soils. These are unsuitable for deep tillage. Farming is incredibly labour-intensive, with endless transplanting, fertilising, and weeding. These jobs are traditionally done by women.

Northern districts have more loamy soils, suitable for deep tillage. Men harness draft animals to prepare the land. This heightens the importance of male labour and lessens the need for female weeding. Eliana Carrenza finds lower female labour force participation and more uneven sex ratios in districts with more loamy soils.

Female labour market participation has fallen across India over the past three decades, but analysis by Lahoti and Swaminathan shows it has fallen the least in the South. This reflects women's higher labour market commitment. Type of work also varies across regions. Southern women are most likely to work for non-kin. This is consistent with women's greater freedom of movement. Over the centuries, Northern men's roles as breadwinners became ingrained.

Men went out to the fields while women remained at home. Thus even before the invasions, men may have been more important to agricultural production. D owries are thus paid to the groom's family.

Daughters are an economic drain. In other world regions where agriculture was traditionally male-dominated, women left family farms in search of new economic opportunities.

In the pre-industrial American Northeast, women and children were surplus to wheat production. Not needed at home, women responded to new opportunities in manufacturing. Surplus female labour was similarly responsive to new opportunities in wheat-growing, medieval Europe. In slack periods, young women and men were a drain on resources. In England, only the first born son inherited. His brothers and sisters left to become hired labourers.

They seldom inherit. Latin American women thus independently migrated to cities in search of jobs. In East Asia, women pursued factory employment to self-finance their dowries. This occurred in the absence of social constraints: purdah, purity, and caste-based policing.

In districts with historically low yields , girls are disproportionately likely to die. Hazar ika, Jha and Sarangi have mapped ancestral yields per hectare, assuming it was rain-fed with low-input. Such districts are associated with worse sex ratios today - controlling for soil texture, religious and caste composition, monthly expenditure, and contemporary rainfall.

There is certainly a correlation between historically low yields and contemporary sex ratios. We can speculate several possible causal mechanisms. Son preference is widespread across India.

Sons are breadwinners, support elderly parents, perform ancestral rites and continue the lineage. As a popular saying in Haryana - recorded by Prem Chowdhry - goes, ' Meehn aur bettya te koon dhappya sai ' Who can be satisfied without rain and sons; both are necessary for cultivation.

When resources are scarce, families prioritise sons. Strategic investment in sons may have been normalised through recurrent famines. India is not unique in this regard. China is similarly patrilineal and patrilocal. Perhaps these difficult decisions seldom arose in India's South and North-easterly fertile soils? Given a more benign geography, letting girls die never became part of the culture.

An alternative hypothesis is that pastoralism was historically pervasive across North-west India, and this entrenched patriarchal norms. Pastoral societies tend to be gender segregated. Men take the herd to pasture , while women stay at home, tending newborn animals and processing milk into ghee.

Men may leave for a few days, searching for new pasture. If men cannot observe women's whereabouts, they may worry about paternity, and try to control female sexuality. Analysing societies across the world, Anke Becker finds that pre-industrial societies that were more dependent on pastoralism had stronger son preference and are more likely to believe in male superiority.

These effects persist today. Women whose ancestors subsisted on pastoralism report less control over their sexuality and greater preference for sons, which is reflected in uneven sex ratios. Pastoral groups are also disproportionately patrilineal and patrilocal.

Rajasthan continues to be a major producer of livestock , wool, and dairy. Across the North-west, there are numerous pastoral communities such as the Raika. Raika men head out, while women tend to veil their faces, eat after everyone else, and refrain from conversing with strangers - or at least in a low voice, from a distance. Jats 33 million strong, predominating in Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi and Haryana were historically pastoral. Arid Rajasthan exceeds the national average rate of rural female labour force participation.

In Haryana, colonial officia ls observed that ' women work as hard as the men if not harder '. Aside from ploughing, driving carts, or digging, there was no agricultural labour that a Jatni woman did not do. Women sow, weed, harvest, thresh, and maintain irrigation channels. But regardless of women's contributions, men are prioritised. Why has women's importance in traditional agriculture not curbed son preference?

Monica Das Gupta emphasises patrilineal, exogamous kinship : 'perhaps the most important determinant of Punjabi parents' attitudes toward girls is the fact that married women can do almost nothing for their natal kin'.

That is precisely why it shocks. It is no longer a philosophical issue of rights. It simply asks: are women safe and free? It forces us to consider cultural forces and the implementation of laws that impact how women are actually treated in a culture, despite formal law, education, employment or income.

India is in denial of the fact that a majority of its women do not feel safe alone on the streets, at work, in markets, or at home, even though they have learned how to cope with this existential anxiety. When I asked young educated women in Delhi if they feel safe, most said no. Indian women are in a constant state of vigilance, like a country on terrorist alert.